


swim, until you can't see land

by accidentalsupernova



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/accidentalsupernova/pseuds/accidentalsupernova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey searches for a path to walk. Kylo stumbles onto his. Worn down by the rain, all the steps start to look the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	swim, until you can't see land

**** **1\. there is no emotion, there is peace**

On the day of Han’s funeral, the clouds roll in, and the members of the Resistance huddle beneath hastily erected rain shields on the open plain before the base. There isn’t a body, of course, just a pyre that towers above them all, even Chewbecca. Maybe they’re better off this way, Rey thinks, spared the sight of the cauterized hole that a son had cut through his father’s heart. 

General Organa stands before them all, and she speaks of the dashing smuggler, of the Resistance hero, of the husband, of the father. Her eyes are dry and her voice is clear and calm. And yet, Rey can _feel_ her grief, a raw and pulsing thing. It mingles with the sharp loss that Rey feels, all of it like a newly broken limb, overlaid upon her old hurts, half-remembered but never forgotten, the ones that never healed right in the Jakku desert. 

When the General falls silent, head bowed, Chewie steps forward, a lone figure marching out to light the pyre they’ve built. The _whoosh_ of the flame, undeterred by rain, is drowned out by the Wookie’s pained howl. From the crowd that surrounds her, Rey hears a hundred prayers in a hundred languages, words for the dead from every corner of the galaxy. There were no funerals on Jakku, just the moment when the scavenger became the scavenged. So she stays quiet, waits and watches until the crowd slowly disperses. 

As he passes by, Poe claps her on the shoulder, a small squeeze of comfort on the tail end. They’ve been trading shifts watching over Finn, who is still unconscious in the medbay. She returns his gesture, and watches as he’s swept along by the other pilots, who have their own, very specific methods for honoring fallen comrades (drinking, mostly, she learned on the night of Starkiller’s destruction).

Rey steps out from beneath the shielding and lets the water wash over her. Since coming to D’Qar, she’s learned nearly twenty words for rain, in twelve different languages, mostly from the pilots who grumble about poor visibility and electrical storms that ground them. Deluge is the word that comes to mind now. A deluge of water, a deluge of grief, both with no end in sight. She misses Finn, who she’s known for barely more than a week, whose spine is still knitting itself back together on base because he came back for her on Starkiller. She misses Han, who she knew for even less time, but Kylo Ren was right. Curled up in one of the cramped bunks of the Millennium Falcon, listening to the hum of the hyperdrive and the whirr of the life support systems, she’d let herself imagine what a father felt like. 

With the rain soaking to her skin, Rey feels like a hollow vessel, a gully carved by wind and water and waiting without end. Leia comes to stand beside her, and for a time, both women watch the pyre burn.

“How can you bear it?” Rey asks, because Rey has only had friends for a week and a half and already doesn’t know if she can stand to face any more loss, any more pain.

“One moment at a time, I suppose. Luke… he taught that all life returns to the Force. That the ones we love never truly leave us.” Her voice is rougher than it was during the eulogy, and her hands are clasped together tightly.

“Do you believe him?” She has a hundred questions about Luke, but in this moment they stay locked in her throat. 

“Han never did, not really. But I… when I close my eyes, there’s something there. Something real.”

When Rey closes her eyes, she still sees the red saber cutting through his body, the unstable beam clawing at the air. Except, her island is there too, and the waters on its shore lap against her mind. There’s a whole other galaxy of light behind her eyes now, pulsing softly, just out of reach.

As quickly as it had begun that morning, the rain clears, and when Rey opens her eyes, she sees the setting sun lighting the parting clouds to vibrant hues. The air is warm and moisture laden, and Rey breathes in the still unfamiliar smell of wet earth. 

“Tomorrow,” she says into the quiet. “I’m going to find Luke tomorrow.” 

 

**2\. peace is a lie, there is only passion**

At first, Kylo Ren knows only pain. Soon enough, the pain turns to rage, because rage is easier to bear. But rage cannot blunt the truth. The scavenger girl had defeated him, overwhelmed him first with her mind and then again on the battlefield, using his own grandfather’s lightsaber against him. He remembers the way the lightsaber had flown past him to settle in her hand, how her small fingers had curved around the silver hilt and somehow it was not preposterous that the sword was hers, had always been hers. 

Bile rises in his throat. He doesn’t know what is worse, that an untrained slip of a girl had bested a Master of the Knights of Ren, or that she wouldn’t deign to strike the killing blow. She’d been ready, Kylo had been able to feel it, the way grief had coursed through her like lightning. And he’d been ready too, to die, if it brought this radiant being down into the darkness. Even after the ground had begun to tear apart between them, he felt the way she measured the distance, calculating trajectories for a leap. And then, nothing. No inner turmoil, no conflict, just a cessation of desire. She had not even spared him a parting glance as she turned to race back through the snowy forest.

Kylo Ren knows in that moment that she’d seen his very core and found him wanting, that she’d weighed and measured, found the life of a single defective stormtrooper more important than his death and her vengeance. He wants to scream, to call his lightsaber to his hand, to destroy until this weakness leaves him. But he’s strapped to a medical gurney on Hux’s personal shuttle, hurtling through space, away from Starkiller’s desctruction. He’s been sedated, he can feel the way the drugs blunt his mind to the Force. Rage burns more fiercely within him, but as ever, it isn’t enough.

In sleep, he dreams of an island, more a spire of rock surrounded by water than anything else. The ocean is wild and hungry at its base. Green moss clings to every surface. He feels a deep-seated urge to set the place ablaze, but no matter how he desperately he grasps for it, his lightsaber does not fly into his hand.

Without knowing why, he begins to climb the water-worn stone steps cut into the cliff face, searching hungrily for any sign of life, any being he can best. The island denies him even that, and so, standing alone at the summit, Kylo Ren gives in, letting a primal scream rip from his throat. 

_Not yet_ , says a voice, echoing from nowhere and everywhere. _Not yet_. 

Kylo is released from the medical droid’s supervision by the time the shuttle makes rendezvous with the First Order fleet.

“Supreme Leader Snoke awaits you,” Hux says, when the docking procedures are complete. Kylo Ren does not reply, refusing for once to be baited by the contempt layered in the other man’s voice. Kylo Ren can feel his master’s presence, can already feel the pressure building against his throat. Kylo Ren has much to answer for, and Snoke has ever been the most careful of accountants. 

He leaves Hux in the antechamber, along with his rage. Rage may be easier to bear, but pain is instructive and Kylo’s master has lessons to teach.

Later, as he duels each of the Knights of Ren in turn beneath his master’s watchful eye (“Prove to me that you still deserve to be their master,” Snoke had said, when he finally deemed Kylo’s lessons, his punishment, complete), Kylo Ren sees the island once more. 

Ben Solo is as dead as his father, at long last. But a new turmoil rises within Kylo Ren. He’d been able to steal just three things from the girl before she had thrown him from her mind, before she had torn him open with prying, grasping hands. He remembers her loneliness, a twin to his, calling out to him. He knows her name, and already it echoes in his mind, a presence without form ( _Rey_ ). And now he dreams her dreams, sees the island that haunted her desert nights. Ben Solo is dead and gone, but in his place, a girl called Rey has left her mark.

Kylo Ren shouts. The sound is made inhuman by the modulator in his mask. One by one, the Knights of Ren fall beneath his blade, and at last he turns to face his master (the hologram, never the flesh). Does he sense the new battle that rages beneath his apprentice’s skin? Snoke’s looming eyes flash in the semi-darkness of the hall.

“Good,” he says, with a voice that echoes in Kylo’s bones, stirs the darkness there, promises blood and power. And yet, deeper still, something in him shivers at the sound, and something in him knows a new fear. 

 

**3\. there is no ignorance, there is knowledge**

Rey has as many questions for Luke as the island has steps (at least eleven hundred and sixty four then, by her count) but in the moment when he finally turns to face her, they all seem unnecessary. Far below, the waves crash, and above them the gulls cry, but all sounds vanish as they stare each other down. It’s as different from her staring contest with Kylo Ren as the endless ocean of this world is from Jakku’s harsh deserts. The last Jedi’s eyes, deep set in a craggy face, are wide open and in them, Rey thinks she can maybe see an entire universe unfolding. She holds the lightsaber out towards him, and it seems to hang between them in her palm, a small star generating a gravity all its own.

At last he steps towards her, but he does not take the saber. Flesh and metal hands alike wrap around her shoulders.

“You’ve come,” he says, in voice made ragged from disuse. But his words, softly spoken, reverberate through her bones. 

Rey has questions, at least eleven hundred and sixty four of them, ranging from the mundane (Why did General Organa laugh when Chewie mentioned ewoks? How did you adapt a beryllium power cell to interface so seamlessly with an R2 unit?) to the earth-shattering (Why did you leave? Why didn’t you stop your nephew? _Why did you let Han die_?). 

In her mind, Finn demands answers to every single question at this very minute, and Han rolls his eyes. But time on Jakku took on a different meaning, and Rey, if nothing else, has learned how to wait. She’s also pretty good at guessing which exhaust vents open out to as-of-yet untouched control panels on an Imperial Destroyer, but she’s pretty sure it’s the first one that will prove more important here. 

Rey holds Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber in her hand and says,

“I need a teacher.”

“Then let’s begin,” he responds. He glances down the mountain-side, to where the Millennium Falcon is parked out of sight below. “But first, you have some goodbyes to say.” His eyes close for just a moment. “We both do.”

“Three months is a long time, little bear,” Chewbacca says in Shryiiwook, an outsized paw resting on her shoulder. He’s called her that ever since they landed back on D’Qar, and Rey had growled at a med-droid before she realized it was only trying to help stabilize Finn. 

She had let him and Luke speak privately before, while she and R2 looked very intently at the ocean for an extended period of time, trying to ignore what sounded to her ears like apologies traded between two old, tired men. It was a very impressive amount of water, she had decided. R2 voiced its concerns about salt and rust. Now she stands at the base of the Falcon’s on-ramp, making her own farewell. 

“I can handle myself,” she assures the Wookie. He grunts in agreement.

“I’m leaving a comm buoy beyond the asteroid belt. It’s one of… one of Han’s. Won’t ping any sensors except the Falcon’s. You have the transponder codes. Just one call, and I’ll be back, faster than light.”

Rey hugs him in response.

Luke waits until the Falcon’s contrails have broken apart in upper atmo before he rejoins her.

“Now, we begin.”

Training begins with lunch, apparently, eaten on the steps with Rey’s legs dangling out above the water. Fish is a new food for Rey, like most meals that aren’t hyper-condensed nutrient powder. She decides she likes it, once she learns to pick out the bones, which is good, as it’s apparently most of what is available to eat on this nameless water world. 

Slowly at first, before Rey even realizes what he’s doing, Luke draws out the story of her life. In between bites, she describes the sands of Jakku and the Graveyard of Ships, the only world she knew, until BB8 and then Finn rolled and skidded, respectively, into her life. She describes the wonder of that first aerial dogfight with the TIE fighters, the way the Falcon had shuddered to glorious life beneath her hands and Finn’s brilliant shooting, and sees Luke’s eyes crinkle with gentle mirth. She describes her first meeting with Han Solo, the way he’d stepped right out of an old space pirate story, like the ones the orphan kids on the outskirts of Niima outpost used to tell. Her throat closes up on Takodana, in the musty hallway where the lightsaber had called to her, _screamed_ at her. 

Luke doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even move, but the air around them seems to lighten, and somehow it’s enough that Rey plows forward, halting only when she gets to Starkiller, to waking up strapped to a chair.

Rey hasn’t told anyone what really happened in the interrogation room. She thinks that General Organa knows, but it hadn’t mattered then, not in the face of everything else that had happened on Starkiller. Anyway, Rey isn’t military, doesn’t answer to the General, and did Leia truly want to know how her son has tried to claw his way into Rey’s mind, how she’d pushed him back, and how, desperate to get his hand off her jaw, she’d torn into his thoughts like so must rusted wiring? She wants to say that Luke doesn’t need to know either, and why didn’t he teach his nephew that you _can’t_ just take anything you want? 

Luke cuts through her increasingly frenzied thoughts, and his voice is older than it’s ever sounded before.

“Rey, I will _never_ enter your mind without your permission.” His hands come together, fingertips touching. She hasn’t seen the gesture before, but she understands the promise and the apology that he doesn’t say aloud.

Jedi training, it turns out, seems to mainly involve two things: running up and down steps, and sitting very still. Rey still somehow wouldn’t trade away a second of it. She accustoms herself to sunrise meditation on the summit, to running over and around the island on an endless loop as the sun moves across the sky.

Rey hadn’t been sure what to expect from Luke as a teacher. This was, after all, the man whose apprentice had turned to the dark side. She’s never had a teacher before, the very idea foreign on Jakku. Rey learned to fly from an ancient simulator, learned languages crouched behind stalls at Niima outpost, learned to scavenge through years of trial and error (three-quarters rations for a power converter marked XJ2, a measly quarter for the XJ2-S, and no wonder, since they subbed out the palladium transformer for inferior selenium). She wonders, idly, what sort of teachers Ben Solo had. Did Han teach him how to navigate a star chart from the Falcon’s cockpit, or tune the subspace radio just so? Did Chewie teach him how to aim a laser crossbow, shooting cans on a green world years ago?

Luke, it turns out, is a quiet teacher, and Rey knows this wasn’t always the case but she doesn’t know how. That first morning, they sit together at the summit.

“Follow my breathing. Try to clear your mind,” he says, and nothing more. 

Later, he will teach her other things. The ancient forms of lightsaber combat, the best way to wrap a burn after the fourth time the little training robot zaps her (“It wouldn’t be able to do that if I could _see_ anything except this blasted helmet.” “Patience, Rey.” “… right.”), how to float in the ocean on her back with her arms extended and the sunset sky stretching out above, exactly what it means to be able to move mountains with her mind. 

They will trade blows, her staff against a dummy sword, and Luke will constantly surprise her with his agility, with the coiled power beneath his craggy face. The lightsaber (her lightsaber?) will sit untouched, for now, and Rey will tape her bruised and scraped knuckles in preparation for another day, another duel. 

All of that will come later. For now, Rey follows his breathing, pre-dawn light filtering through her closed eyelids. Slowly, she begins to feel Luke sitting across from her, a small sun of his own making, and next to him, her own power, just a flickering candle by comparison. The universe spreads out below, constellations of light waiting to be known. Rey breathes, and the Force breathes with her.

 

**4\. through passion, I gain strength**

He’s dreamt himself onto the island again, but now _she’s_ here, cross-legged at the summit. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is slow and steady. Kylo paces around her seated figure, unable to explain to himself what exactly he finds so irritating about her peaceful visage. 

“Be quiet,” Rey snaps, startling him into stillness. Her eyes are still closed, hands resting open-palmed on her knees. 

“I—what?” he says, still too surprised to respond with any eloquence. He had, in truth, thought this a dream of his own making. Usually, in his dreams they fight endlessly, lightsabers screaming. Sometimes he wins, and sometimes she does, but always they fight. He’s in her dream now, he realizes with mounting horror. He feels her irritation pressing at him, crackling bright around her. 

“Your mind is so _loud_. Like a pair of kath hounds, snarling over the last scrap of meat. Or two banthas mating.” The image she’s conjured up seems to amuse her. Kylo tries to still his mind, erasing the idea of a very different kind of mating as swiftly as it appears. She continues, seemingly unaware of his thoughts. “I’m trying to meditate. It’s distracting.”

“A Jedi weakness,” he taunts her, finding his voice at last. “I have no need for such flimsy tools.” Rey’s eyes open for the first time. They are tractor-beam-like in their intensity. She raises an eyebrow, skepticism writ large on her face.

“Is that why I was able to defeat you back on Starkiller?”

“That isn’t—!” She cuts him off with a dismissive hand wave.

“Then be quiet,” she says again, eyes fluttering shut. Her breathing evens out once more. He finds it near-unbearable, how untroubled she seems by his presence. Just months ago, she had shrunk away from him, shaking with fear. 

“I’m not,” she says, opening her eyes again.

“What?”

Rey stands, power flowing over her like a cloak, and now she’s the one who prowls around him, while Kylo is rooted to the spot. Standing side by side, she would barely reach his shoulder, but in this moment, her will dominates him, leaving him motionless and dry-mouthed.

“I’m not afraid of you. You’re a monster, and a killer, but beneath that mask you’re still a spoiled, lonely little boy.” Her lip curls. “I’m not afraid of him at all.”

Kylo Ren screams, letting fury run rampant through his veins, ready to crush her with all the power commensurate to the Dark side of the Force. His fist closes, power thrumming through his fingers, and the island is gone, leaving him alone in his bed.

_Temper, temper_ , her voice echoes chidingly in his head before vanishing completely. Kylo scrambles to his feet, chest heaving, palms sweating. He tries to return to the island in his mind, reaching desperately for some trace of her in the void. His entire body trembles with the need for violence, for destruction. But Rey’s parting words are still ringing in his ears. He bares his teeth into the darkness. The girl knows nothing of him, or the true power of the Force. He will prove it to her, one way or another.

Slowly, he folds himself onto the cold floor, settling into a position he hasn’t taken in years. Kylo opens himself to the Force, feels it flow around him and through him. Rey is out there somewhere, along with the hated Skywalker, flickering beacons of light. Elsewhere in the vastness of the galaxy, his own master is a black hole in the fabric of the Force, a dark wellspring of power. Kylo breathes, in and out, honing his anger to a fine edge. Rey will not best him again, not in his mind or on the battlefield. When they next meet, he will teach her the power of the Dark side, once and for all.

It does not occur to him that she has already managed to teach him a lesson of her own.

 

**5\. there is no passion, there is serenity**

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Luke remarks over breakfast. Rey had not even considered the possibility that Luke, seated across from her as he always is during morning meditation, would sense Kylo Ren shouting in her mind. 

“I thought they were dreams at first,” she admits, sheepish but undaunted. There’s certainly no point in lying to Luke.“But they’re real. I mean, I think so. And he’s so… emotional. Conflicted. All the time. It’s exhausting,” she adds, a little plaintively. For the first time she thinks to wonder if this isn’t some trick of the Dark side, some ploy on the part of Kylo and his master to lure her from the light. 

But Luke doesn’t seem angry, or even particularly perturbed. If anything, he looks thoughtful. Anyway, if there’s one thing Rey has learned from her endless arguments with Kylo, it’s that he’s a terrible liar, just the absolute worst. When they speak, she feels his anger, irritation, and confusion cascading through him, but never guile or any hidden motives. Just a hapless monster with the face of a sad child.

“He was a boy once. In many ways, he still is,” Luke remarks. He’s still wearing his thinking face.

“He killed Han, he murdered him in cold blood!” Rey’s grief has lessened in the months since Starkiller, but every now and then the pain flares white hot beneath her ribs.

“And that deed will haunt him for as long as he lives,” Luke says gently, unperturbed by her outburst. “The Sith require deep emotion, to fuel to their power. A Jedi—she requires peace.”

Luke pauses to give Rey a significant look. She raises her hands in apology, abashed. He nods, flashes her a quick smile. It never fails to surprise Rey, how he can soothe the sting of his more difficult teachings with such a small gesture. Luke continues on.

“No matter what path he chooses to walk along, Kylo Ren will have to face what he has done.” 

They have never spoken of Luke’s former apprentice with such directness before. His words surprise Rey, and she can’t help but lean forward.

“Then you think he can be saved? That he _should_ be saved?” The questions spill from Rey’s lips, one after another. They are distinct in her mind, each answer as important as the other.

“Only Ben can save himself.” It’s the first time that either of them has ever referred to the boy that became Kylo Ren. Distantly, Rey recalls the bridge, and how he’d looked so young in that moment, so afraid. 

“But will he?” Rey presses. Luke closes his eyes, and Rey senses the way he extends himself, reaching out into the flow of the Force. 

“Much is written in the Force. But there are few who have the eye to read it,” Luke says at last. Rey knows better than to push further when Luke is at his most mystical, as he is now (“more like obtuse,” Finn grumbles in her head). And just like that, Luke stands, gathering the remains of their meal.

“Why don’t you do a lap of the island and think about it?” he suggests, very nearly grinning. Rey suppresses a groan. She’d imagined a lot of things about the last living Jedi on her long journey across the galaxy to find him. She’d imagined someone wise and learned, or a man broken down by years of loss. And sometimes, Luke is those things exactly. But she never imagined that he would believe so firmly in the power of endless running as the cornerstone of a Jedi’s education, or that he’d tell the most outlandish stories about his capabilities as an X-wing pilot (I have _got_ to tell that one to Poe, she thinks, after a particularly tall-sounding tale about blasting womp rats at Mach-3), or that he of all people would truly understand what it meant to grow up in an ocean of sand in a distant corner of the galaxy. 

Every so often it rains on their island, a mist so fine that it’s nearly indistinguishable from sea spray. Each time it’s happened, Rey can’t help but run to the summit, letting the water bead on her hair, on her eyelashes, on her tongue. And each time, Luke has joined her, accumulating dew on his wild beard. Two desert children, watching with unbridled joy as rainbows arc across the sky.

A day comes when Rey squares up for their afternoon practice duel, staff in hand, and for the first time, she _breathes_ , just like Luke has been teaching her to do in morning meditation. The world brightens around her, sharpens with startling clarity. They bow to one another, and Rey doesn’t hesitate. The forms she has studied are as clear as day, and she flows through them strike by strike. She moves on instinct, knowing without seeing exactly where Luke’s attacks will land. When she opens her eyes, Luke’s sword is clattering to the ground, and her staff is resting against his neck. She disengages, not quite believing her eyes, and they bow to one another once more.

“Well done, Rey,” Luke says. She thinks it’s pride she sees in his eyes, but she’s not quite sure. No one has ever been proud of her before.

When Rey wakes the next morning, she knows immediately that Luke is gone. She climbs to the summit, still half asleep in the pre-dawn light. The lightsaber is there, resting on the cairn of rocks Luke had had her building with her power months ago.

When she reaches for it, Luke’s voice echoes through her mind.

_Trust the Force, Rey.You know what to do_. And the funny thing is, though she hadn’t known it until that very moment, Rey does. She settles into the familiar pose, feeling the first rays of the sun warming her cheeks. The lightsaber glows, its silvery sheen reflecting more than just the sun’s light in her mind’s eye. Whoever it may have belonged to, whoever it once was intended for (the briefest flash of an image races through her head: a younger Luke, his hand on the bony shoulder of a dark-haired boy), it’s hers now.

Rey visualizes the saber’s design in her mind, the way she made sense of the Millennium Falcon’s ravaged electrical systems or the cavernous reaches of a downed Imperial Destroyer. It’s nearing half a century old, this sword, and it’s travelled the length and breadth of the galaxy.

_We have work to do_ , she thinks, and from nowhere and everywhere, a voice replies.

_Yes._

It takes three days until Rey sits back from the ad hoc workbench she’s constructed in her stone hut and knows that she’s finished. She’s had to fall back to her scavenging ways, breaking down any and all of the electronics Luke had left behind to find the parts she needs. Her staff, the first and best weapon she ever built herself, is deconstructed too. And now it’s done.

Nerves and excitement warring within her, she takes the saber in her hands and returns to the mountaintop. Rey steps into the first position, feeling the weight of the hilt in her hands. With a deep breath, she activates her weapon, and a flush of joy spreads through her as the twin blades of the staff spring to life beneath her hands. Eyes closing, she begins the first pattern dance and then the second, and only when she’s run through every movement Luke had taught her does she come to a halt. 

She retrieves the transponder that Chewie had given her, over a year before. Minutes later, a heavily encrypted message is bouncing off the buoy at the system’s outer edge, accelerating through hyperspace to wherever the Millennium Falcon currently is.

She senses the ship less than a week later, as soon as it drops out of hyperdrive. She’s waiting at the edge of the makeshift landing field when the Falcon touches down, having said her goodbyes to the island that morning. 

The landing gears engage and the ramp descends. Rey surprises herself, running to meet Chewie as he emerges and wraps her in an all-encompassing embrace.

“Look at you,” he rumbles, when they finally disentangle themselves. “You’ve grown, little bear.”

“I’m still me, Chewie,” she protests, laughing as she cranes her neck to look at the Wookie.

“And more.” Rey frowns, not sure what exactly he means, but she’s distracted by a noise from within the hold. She whips her head around, hand on her lightsaber, and then’s she’s running, laughing, shouting, as Finn descends the ramp and manages to hug her more tightly than even Chewie had managed.

“Finn!”

“Rey!” Their voices overlap and intermingle. “You’re okay!” “You too!” “Your jacket!” “BB8 says hi!” “You came back!” Her voice must say too much, because Finn takes a breath, and pulls her close once more. 

“Of course I did,” he says into her hair. And then he lifts her up in the air, whirling her around, and there are tears on her cheeks and maybe on his too. 

“C’mon Rey,” Finn says, extending his hand. “Let’s go home.”

Chewie grunts in pleased agreement. Together, the three of them embark. Rey runs her hands across the bulkheads as she walks, reacquainting herself with the ship. The thought dawns on her, that this ship, with her friends onboard, may be all the home she needs.

Settling into the pilot’s chair is a homecoming all its own. Finn is rattling around in the galley as Rey warms up the sublight engines. Chewbacca leans over, speaking in his closest approximation of a whisper. 

“I’m glad you’re back, little bear. The Big Shot is a good kid, but he isn’t much of a pilot.”

“I missed you too, Chewie,” she says, as the Falcon blasts to life beneath her hands.

After the telemetry is set and the proper coordinates punched into the nav computer, Rey excuses herself from the cockpit, leaving the ship in Chewie’s capable paws. When she exits into the main corridor, she finds Finn standing at the door to the bunk nearest the cockpit, looking slightly sheepish.

“Finn?” 

“Oh, Rey, you’re here!” He starts a little, one hand going up to curl at the back of his neck. She remembers the gesture from their first wild ride in the Falcon, when he was preparing to say or do something he was especially unsure of.

“Is there anywhere else I’d be?” she asks. Perhaps Finn’s gone round the bend while she’s been gone? It seems unlikely. Maybe _she’s_ gone round the bend? That seems more likely, with only Luke and Kylo (well, he hardly counts, not really, she thinks quickly), with only Luke for company. 

“Oh, well, no, I mean, the cockpit, maybe? But I was thinking, I mean, General Organa was the one who kinda suggested it, and Chewie and BB8 helped a lot, but—” 

“Finn, spit it out, what’s going on?” Rey’s pretty sure now this is just a Finn thing, not a crazy thing.

“We made you a room,” he says, all in a rush, stepping aside so that Rey can finally peer into the bunk he’d been guarding. Two of the three beds have been cleared out in favor of an electronics workbench, a modest set of tools laid out upon it. There’s a mat for meditation in the corner. There’s a tiny picture hanging above the remaining bed. When Rey peers closer, she sees that it’s a holo, a miniature rainstorm above a blue ocean.

“Do you like it?” Finn asks, after several minutes. She turns back to him, beaming. 

“It’s perfect, Finn.” She takes his hands in hers, squeezing, trying to convey the warm rush of emotion that’s tightening up her throat. She settles down onto the mat, and gestures for him to join her. “Now tell me everything I’ve missed.” 

He smiles jubilantly and launches into a story about how, by their powers combined, he and Poe brought down an entire Immobilizer cruiser with a single X-wing and a homemade EMP. 

The trip through hyperspace takes a little more than ten days, and Rey keeps to her morning meditation throughout, not that morning has much meaning on the ship. She imagines herself back on the island at sunrise, lets herself sink deep into the Force. Somehow, she’s not surprised to find Kylo there as well.

“Rey,” he says, without bothering to turn and look at her. There’s an unfamiliar note in his voice, and he’s standing precipitously close to the cliff’s edge, gazing out over the water. Rey joins him there, because she’s always been curious (the best scavengers are), and Kylo Ren is a question that seems to grow ever larger in her mind.

Her conversation with Luke rattles around her head, the second time she’d ever heard his real name. _Ben_. He glances at her sidelong, as if he’s heard her thoughts, before he resumes his careful study of the ocean below. Rey takes the opportunity to study him. His armor is nowhere to be seen, and in its place he wears an open-necked tunic and loose linen pants (both black, _of course_ ). His hands, ungloved, drum absently against his thighs. Rey is struck, absurdly, by their length, their delicacy, so at odds with the vicious facade he projects with his armor.

“Does your master know about… this?” she asks, gesturing to, well, everything, because the question has only just occurred to her, and because Kylo isn’t Luke and she’ll ask him whatever she pleases. His reaction takes her by surprise, though later she’ll wonder why. She’s grown accustomed to a gentler Kylo, in this strange dreamscape they seem to share. But now his face pales (even more, who knew _that_ was possible), and his hands at his sides clench into fists.

He whirls around, grabbing Rey by the shoulders. Is this the first time they’ve ever touched in this place? She thinks so. Half of her had expected him to turn to smoke if she ever did try to make contact. Which she wouldn’t, because there’s no reason for her to be touching Kylo Ren. Probably, she amends to herself, looking up into his dark eyes. He looks worried. It’s a strange look for him. Different.

“You had better hope he doesn’t,” Kylo says at last. Everything comes together in Rey’s mind, like a particularly tricky circuit that takes a little extra prodding. Kylo Ren is afraid. Not for himself, but for her. She’s reminded of her first meeting with Finn, when he’d paused in the midst of a warzone to ask if she was alright. It had seemed foolish at first, all this caring that he did, like wandering the desert with a still-intact sensor array and no weapon. You were practically begging to get jumped by a scavenger who was a little more desperate to survive. But Finn had made it seem so simple, to care about others, to fight for them, even when his own fear lay like a shadowed shroud on his heart. 

And now here’s Kylo, whose mind is sometimes its own warzone, who is so torn up inside that Rey thinks it’s a wonder that he doesn’t simply fly apart into a hundred disparate pieces, and Kylo is worried about her. 

She wraps a hand around his wrist. His cheeks flush, and Rey takes a moment to think about the fact that Kylo Ren is blushing at her touch. It’s his sword arm, of course. She isn’t surprised to feel that his skin is littered with tiny burn scars, souvenirs from that mad, half-broken blade of his. 

“It’s not—that’s my lightsaber. You can’t just insult—”

“It’s insane,” Rey says firmly. She should probably let go of his wrist now, she realizes faintly. She should definitely find the flex of tendons beneath his skin less fascinating than she does in this particular moment. And then, because her mind seems particularly dazed,

“You’re in my mind,” she says accusingly.

“We’re in each others’ minds… aren’t we?” Kylo has the grace to look confused and then abashed. It’s enough to convince her that he wasn’t actually trying to dig inside her head. More inside than he already is, anyway. Outside her own mind, she can sense Finn’s familiar light hovering just beyond her door.

“But you were—nevermind. Look, I think someone is, that is, I need to go.” Kylo simply looks at where her hand is still wrapped around his wrist.

“Oh. Right. That’s, that’s my bad.” She pulls her hand away, but Kylo reaches out, catching both her hands within his larger ones. 

“Rey. I wouldn’t tell him. Not about this. Not about any of it.” His dark eyes are fixed on hers. It causing something curl inside her, hot and tight at the pit of her stomach. It’s not unpleasant, precisely.

“I know,” she says, because she does. 

She opens her eyes in her bunk. Finn is peering in through the open door. 

“All done meditating?” he asks. Rey nods, not quite ready to speak. “S’good. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, you know, when you get all,” he wiggles his fingers in the air.

Rey laughs, and clambers to her feet. 

“Was there something you needed me for?” she asks ( _yes_ , says Kylo’s voice at the back of her brain, just a tinny echo. Rey ignores it, doesn’t let her cheeks get hot). 

“Chewie says we’ll be dropping out of hyperspace soon. He asked if you wanted to do the honors. At least, I _think_ that’s what he said. Maybe he was just telling me to stop bugging him when he’s flying. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

 

**6\. through strength, I gain power**

He feels her moments before the Millennium Falcon crashes through the upper atmosphere. He doesn’t bother wondering how the Falcon had managed to thwart the First Order’s blockade of this planet—the complement of TIE fighters that come screaming after her tell the tale clear enough. A squadron of X-wings launches from a distant hangar and rises to meet them, and Kylo indulges for a moment longer, watching how the much larger Falcon makes the Resistance and First Order pilots alike look like amateurs. This mission, conceived by Hux, who understands only guns and manpower, is almost certainly doomed to failure. Kylo is here only on the whim of his master, and now he wonders if Snoke foresaw the inevitable meeting in the Force. 

It’s been nearly two years since he locked blades with Rey in anything more than fevered dreams, and he hungers for it, for the chance to chase her fire once again, to throw himself on the pyre and see if he burns. She has been haunting his dreams all the while, and in his sleep he has fought her all across the universe, fought her prying words and too bright eyes. 

At last, at last, the Millennium Falcon lands, its pursuers lost or destroyed somewhere in the air above. Kylo’s entire body hums with anticipation. The Wookie and the traitorous stormtrooper are nowhere to be found, but there is Rey, marching down her ship’s ramp, descending into the canyon to meet him. She doesn’t look like a Jedi, not quite, still dressed in something akin to her old scavenger garb. She looks like Rey, and Kylo doesn’t know when that began to mean something to him.

She approaches, and he feels her reaching out with the Force, searching for anyone else who might be lying in wait around the twisting canyon walls. She doesn’t need to know that he’d sent his platoon of stormtroopers away, just moments after she’d begun her descent. Kylo doesn’t need to see her defeat a troop of Force-deaf automatons, he knows from Hux’s embittered snarls that she’s gotten very good at killing stormtroopers in the months since her return to the Resistance. The tendrils of her mind reach, brush against his own. It’s a softer tentative touch than anything Kylo has ever felt before.

“Still wearing that mask?” she asks in greeting, when she’s come close enough to be heard. Kylo shrugs, but he removes the mask almost immediately. Rey’s been inside his head, there’s no need for pretense. Almost no need, he amends to himself, watching the shift of muscle in Rey’s arms as she stretches, as unhurried as if this were merely a practice round between apprentices with wooden swords. 

She catches his eyes, apparently done with her stretches, and without saying anything at all, their lightsabers flare to life as one, twin stars being born. It’s the first time Kylo has seen the weapon that Rey has built for herself. He can feel the way she took apart his grandfather’s saber, reconfigured it into something wholly new, something unique to her. In the deepest parts of his mind, Kylo wonder if perhaps she’s having the same effect on him. 

Her lightsaber is more staff than sword, emitting two beams of bright blue light, as steady as her gaze. In contrast, Kylo’s blade snaps and snarls, crackling with licks of reddish flame. For a moment they stand still, and then they move as one, their swords coming together in a torrential shower of sparks.

Rey’s forms have shifted since their first battle, when she had struggled to adapt her knowledge of the staff to a single blade, when she was guided by a rush of Force so pure that it still burns in Kylo’s memory. Briefly, he wonders where she learned these forms, far more advanced than Skywalker had ever seen fit to teach his first fledging apprentices. Snoke had come to him then, offering knowledge that was lost forever to the Jedi. Under Snoke’s tutelage, Kylo has learned all the ancient forms, slowly begun their mastery. 

And now here is Rey, executing a clean and precise Makashi opening attack that drives him back, stumbling, until he can execute a counter attack, catching her blade in his cross guard and redirecting her strike, nearly sending her over his hip. He moves to press his advantage, but Rey recovers with lightning speed, and her return is flurry of strikes that are needle-sharp with their precision. She dances around him, staff whirling about her body, endlessly seeking openings in his defense. Kylo knows ( _hopes_ ) that he can overpower her, if only he can catch her. 

Frustration builds between his shoulder blades, irritation making him sloppy, not powerful. Rey scores a hit against his left knee. Kylo shudders and nearly falls. He shouts, lashing out, and for the first time, he wounds her, cutting a streak of bloody red across her collarbone. She doesn’t cry out, though her face pales and her knuckles go white against the hilt of her staff. Kylo expects her to falter, even for a moment, as he seeks an opening that will end this battle. 

But Rey takes a deep breath, and then the whole world shifts around her. Kylo is instantly transported back to Starkiller, as he once more feels energy begin to thrum around her body, the Force gathering so thickly that she burns white hot to his eyes. Her attack redoubles, swifter than before, beating him back towards the canyon wall. She lands a perfect _sun djem_ attack, snaking beneath his cross guard, scorching his fingers, and he watches his sword sail out of his reach.

Rey freezes, mid-strike, eyes wide, and Kylo sees the light within her dissipate. It is just like it was on Starkiller, when she had left him in the snow, abandoned him for her friend the traitor. He cannot, will not let her leave like this, with their duel unfinished, and so he runs at her, unthinking, a full-on tackle that sends them both sprawling in the dirt. Rey’s reaction is instantaneous; she slams her head into his chin, splitting his lip, shoving him up and over with a push of the Force that leaves him seeing stars. 

And just like that, she’s flipped them round, and her hands clamp down on his wrists like vises. A single, scrawny knee presses down into his stomach, and though she is featherlight above him, Kylo feels the weight of the world pressing down from above. Tendrils of hair have escaped her braids, stick sweaty to the sides of her face. Her chest moves with ragged breaths, and blood seeps slowly through the charred fabric at her shoulder. Kylo knows that he could, that he should throw her off, but she’s frozen him with nothing more than the sharp press of her knee against his rib cage, her too tight grip on his wrists.

Slowly, so slowly that he isn’t sure it’s really happening at all, Rey moves one hand from his wrist to hover just above his face. Her fingers burn where they rest against his cheek, and when she traces out the scar she gave him, Kylo gives in and lets out a low moan. Rey’s eyes flutter shut, dark eyelashes brushing pale cheeks. His whole world narrows to her hand, to her thumb brushing small circles across his cheekbone and his lip, still bleeding sluggishly. When she pulls her hand away, something horribly close to a whine grows in the back of his throat. 

His blood is smeared on her thumb, and Rey darts out her tongue, eyes still locked on his, to lick it from her finger. 

Kylo surges upward, without displacing the hand that still holds his wrist to the ground, to press his lips to hers, to chase his blood on her tongue. For a terrible moment, Rey is motionless above him, unresponsive. This is the moment, he thinks, when she calls her lightsaber back into her hand, cuts him down for good. Her eyes darken, a decision made, and Kylo tenses beneath her.

And then she bears down, all lips and teeth and tongue, overwhelming him with the force of her kiss. Her knees move to bracket his waist, her hands fist tightly in his hair. Rey kisses him like she’s drowning and he’s air, like this is another another battle to be won. Kylo knows that in this, she’s already won, that there was never even a fight. Rey is fire on his mouth, she leaves a devastating burn at every point of contact between them.

He can hear the pounding of her heart, feel the trembling in her limbs. At any moment, he is prepared for her to spring backwards, to strike him down, to leave for good. Instead, she bites down on his bottom lip, licks the cut she gave him, and he bucks up against her, hips seeking out friction of their own accord. 

Rey moves from his lips to the soft skin of his neck, teeth scraping across his adams apple, and Kylo allows himself, for the first time, to touch her in kind. His hands skim the cloth she wraps about her forearms, skating up to her shoulders. When he brushes the wound he’d cut into her shoulder, she hisses in pain.

“I’m sorry, Rey, I’m sorry, I’m—” Rey swallows the litany whole, her mouth soft and warm against his. She tugs his hands, placing them at hollows of her hips, a forgiveness of another kind. Her waist is so small beneath his hands, but he knows that underneath her skin is steel. He _feels_ the heat curling in her belly, just as it does for him, lust intermingling with something deeper, more terrifying. For a dizzying moment, he sees himself through her eyes, looking upwards with a worshipful gaze. He pulls her close, presses her against the hard length of his body and revels in the way she feels, hovering above the crux of his thighs, like she was always made to fit there.

Rey is busy sucking bruises into his collarbone when the comm pings, as Kylo works ineffectually at the ties that close her tunic, his only desire to feel more of her skin beneath his fingers, to trace the ridge of her spine, and memorize it all. He is so wrapped up in the glorious feel of her hips, resting tantalizingly close to where his cock grows hard and heavy against his thigh, that he does not immediately recognize the voices that crackle to life over the line. 

Dameron, the Resistance pilot whose mind he’d torn through in search of the map to Skywalker, is shouting jubilantly, his cries peppered with bursts of joy from FN-2187. In an instant, whatever spell had been cast between the two of them lies shattered on the ground. Rey throws herself to her feet, lightsaber flying to her hand. She looks wrecked, lips reddened, hair mussed, cheeks high with color. Blood from his lip is smeared across her throat, a perfect mirror for the bruises she’s left across his neck. Kylo lies where she’s left him, aching, waiting for her to make a move, to end him with word or sword.

She does neither. For the first time, she looks at him with real fear in her eyes. Her thoughts are screaming at him, _was this a trick, was it a lie_ , an agonized repetition in her mind. He struggles to find words to explain something that he does not himself understand, to reassure her that it wasn’t a gambit, wasn’t a lie, because this was real, can’t she feel it? 

He’s reaching out to say those words when she slams the door of her mind shut. Kylo cries out as though he’s lost a limb. His mind seeks hers out on instinct as he stumbles to his feet, but he finds in her only smooth glass without a flicker of emotion beneath. His wounded knee shudders and he collapses to the ground once again. And so Kylo Ren stays on his knees, watching her go, the rigid spine of a Jedi hiding any trace of the woman who has haunted his dreams.

Long after the Millennium Falcon has left, sublight engines arcing blue against the fading sky, he wonders with mounting horror if this had been Snoke’s goal all along.

 

**7\. there is no chaos, there is harmony**

Rey doesn’t know what exactly she says to Finn and Poe over the comm, or how exactly she pilots the Falcon back to the nearby star system, where the Resistance’s celebration of the successful destruction of the First Order blockade is well under way. Finn finds her moments after the Falcon touches down, and he pulls her into a tight hug, speaking at near-lightspeed all the while.

“And then Poe caused two TIE fighters to COLLIDE, it was _amazing_ , Rey, you should’ve seen it—Rey, you’re hurt, why didn’t you say? BB8, I need a medic over here right away! There’s blood all over you, what happened? Was it, was it him?” Rey doesn’t answer, just leans into Finn’s gentle embrace and buries her head in the soft leather of his jacket.

“C’mon, we’ll get you sorted,” Finn promises, leading her carefully through the throngs of pilots and technicians. Rey doesn’t know how to tell him just how monumental an undertaking that may prove to be. 

The cut across her shoulder and collarbone is long but shallow, but the medic warns her that without dermal grafting, it’s sure to scar. Rey waves off the offer. She has plenty of scars already, there’s hardly any harm in one more. And this one is no different than any of the others, she tells herself. It’s almost convincing.

The noise of the festivities filters through the air vents, intermixed with the quiet beeps of medical machinery. Rey knows she should join the others, hear the highlights of the victories they achieved, both on the ground and in the air. She pulls herself up, determined to do just that, but Finn grabs her hand, stops her short.

“Nuh-uh,” he says, shaking his head. “You look like you’re gonna fall over any second, Rey. And I am not going to be the one who lets our best and only Jedi knight brain herself on our own base, of all things. General Organa would _skin me alive_. I wouldn’t make a good pelt, Rey.”

“She’d only do it if Chewie didn’t beat her to it,” Rey points out, helpfully.

“Exactly. So c’mon, bed for you. You’re still bunking in the Falcon, right?” Rey gives up on arguing, knowing that this isn’t a fight she’s going to win. So she lets herself rely on Finn’s steady hands to guide her through another unfamiliar base.

“You sure you wanna sleep in the ship tonight?” he asks again, as they exit into the cool nighttime air. “You could definitely squeeze in with Poe and me.”

“Mm,” she says, not sure how to explain her need for a bolthole of her own making. Finn near tucks her into bed, undoing her braids when Rey, her hands still trembling slightly with exhaustion, struggles with the ties. 

“Want me to stay?” he asks, crouching down besides the bed.

“Can’t have Mr. Big Deal missing out on the festivities,” she says, teasing.

“There will be others,” he replies, eyes bright with optimism. It’s a good look on him, far better than hunted mien he’d worn in their early days together.

“Go celebrate, Finn. I bet Poe’s already looking for you.” Her reward is the blush that darkens the boy’s cheeks. 

“You’re cruel,” he tells her, but his hand belies the words, fingers lacing together with hers for a quick squeeze. “I’ll come back,” he promises, as he stands.

“I know you will,” Rey says. She does.

She listens to his footsteps echo through the ship and then fade away. Slowly, she lets her breathing even out, falling into a rhythm that matches the cycling of the life-support systems vibrating gently through the bulkhead. Her mind and body hover on the edge of exhaustion, and Rey knows just how easy it would be to open herself to the Force and let it carry her into sleep. But even this is too much, because Rey can _feel_ his shouts echoing through the Force, small ripples in a pond that threaten to become a tsunami, should she let him in. 

Sleep impossible, she hobbles over to her workbench, shifting through the clutter until something catches her eye—the gutted remnants of the aft deflector shield generator. One of the many nerf herders who’d taken possession of the Falcon during her stay on Jakku had tried to reroute the power to beef up the shielding, leaving the whole unit a smoking wreck. With care, she starts to pick out the last bits of charred wiring from the casing, in preparation for salvaging the part. Her hands, still intimately familiar with this sort of work, steady out at last.

The act of rebuilding the circuit boards is soothing enough that Rey doesn’t immediately realize her mistake. In her newly-calmed state, she’s open to the Force, and to him. She near jumps out of her skin when she feels his presence behind her, burning her hand on her soldering iron.

“Rey, wait, please!” Kylo Ren cries out before she has a chance to slam the connection shut. His arm is outstretched, palm up and open, entreating her to let him stay, but he doesn’t try to touch her or break deeper into her mind.

“Please,” he says again, eyes bright and pleading. He’s unarmored and unarmed, and with his hair falling in waves about his face, he looks young and afraid. 

“Okay, fine,” Rey relents. She watches with some fascination as he folds all his gangly limbs to sit on the mat on her floor. Despite his height, he’s nearly managed to make himself look small. Rey stays on the stool, perched just out of his reach. His eyes flicker uncomfortably to and from the sight of her sucking her burnt finger into her mouth to soothe the hurt. She can feel his desire surge like a punch to the gut, and she’s equally aware of how he fights to tamp it down.

“So talk,” she says at last. “Or are you just here to interrupt my work?” She gestures expansively to the circuits pilled up behind her. 

“It wasn’t a lie,” he says hurriedly. “It wasn’t a trick.” His mind is painfully open to her, and Rey can feel the truth in his words, his excruciating sincerity. There’s a headache building behind her eyes, and Rey rubs her temples, trying to chase it away. There’s no amount of training from Luke that could have prepared her for this, she thinks tiredly.

“Then why did you do it?” she asks, because his answer might as well be written on her bones but she needs to hear him say it. The words tumble from his lips almost as soon as she finishes speaking.

“Because touching you like touching the sun, like touching the Force itself.” He looks at her, beseechingly. “Because when I kiss you, I don’t feel afraid.”

That’s the difference between them, Rey knows. Kylo Ren fights his fear, runs from it when it threatens to overwhelm him. But fear has ever been Rey’s constant companion, for all the life that she can remember. Fear of being left behind forever, fear of losing the little she has and the precious friends she’s made. Rey has always let her fear in, and now she knows it intimately, knows when to let it win and how to push it back.

She gets off the stool and goes to kneel in front of him. Kylo watches her with the sort of wariness she’s always reserved for the particularly vicious breed of sand snake that likes to nest in electrical panels in the Graveyard of Ships. They aren’t touching, not even a little, but Rey can feel the beating of his heart, the little crescent moons his nails dig into his clenched palms, the dryness of his mouth. 

“This is when I’m most afraid,” she tells him, and pulls his hand to her chest, lets his long fingers splay into the hollows beneath her collarbone. It’s unnecessary, she knows that he’s feeling her emotions as clearly as she feels his. None of this is real, it’s all in her head, but she can feel the calluses on his palm from years of lightsaber training and the way his fingertips instinctively seek out the ridge of scar tissue beneath her tunic. 

“Then why?” he repeats her question from before, but his tone is nearly pleading.

She rises up, his hand still splayed across her heart, and brushes her lips across his forehead. Rey knows he can feel the way she trembles, the fear that rises in her chest. She lets it stay there as she sinks back down so they’re at eye level, her straining up, him craning down.

“Because being afraid makes us human,” she tells him. She doesn’t need to explain how kissing him is the closest thing she knows to flying, how fear is just one side of the knife, just a sharp cut away from infinite possibility, because in this moment there isn’t Rey, there isn’t Kylo. There’s only one being, one heartbeat, one breath that they pass between themselves. He presses their foreheads together, and Rey feels his tears on her skin. Their lips meet, and Rey _soars_.

In the morning, Finn will find her, still slumped over the workbench. He scolds her, without heat, dragging her back into the world outside. 

“Even Jedi need to eat, Rey!” he tells her sternly, though he’s smiling and so is she. Rey nods, lets him tug her along. For the first time in ages, her sleep had been sound and without dreams.

 

**8\. through power, I gain victory**

The First Order is crumbling. Kylo Ren sees it in the way the generals’ faces grow pinched and weary, stress deepening the lines around their mouths. He doesn’t concern himself with their struggles. The Knights of Ren are a weapon forged by Snoke for a wholly separate purpose. Only to himself will Kylo admit that he is no longer certain what that purpose is. 

And besides, he think snidely, there is some pleasure in watching Hux grovel before the Supreme Leader for a change. 

Hux leaves, humbled, and Kylo is left alone with the flickering hologram of his Master.

“It is time,” Snoke intones, “for you to learn the truth. You must come to me, my apprentice. Gather your knights. I will show you the true power of the Dark side.”

Kylo feels a pressure at the base of his skull. Slowly, an image builds in his mind, ancient hyperspace routes that stretch across the galaxy, a path to Snoke. 

“Yes, Master.” Kylo bows, and does not raise his head until the transmission cuts out. Fear curdles in the pit of his stomach. This has always been his true goal, the culmination of his years with the First Order. And now he is afraid of what awaits him in the unknown reaches of the galaxy. 

He returns to his personal shuttle, lets the mask fall to the ground. Activating the communications console, he taps out a subspace frequency code that he hasn’t used in years, that he had sworn to forget. He opens a line to the Millennium Falcon.

“Rey.”

“Kylo? How did you get this frequency?”

“Han… My father never changed it.” He hears an intake of breath across the line, soft and staticky. 

“I see,” she says at last, quiet and thoughtful. “Is something happening?” 

The words lock in his throat. His course is charted out before on the nav screen. He’ll need to make a refueling stop, if he’s to make it all the way into the unknown regions where Snoke has summoned him. It would be so easy, to ask her to meet him, to see her one last time, before… before whatever comes next. 

“N-no…” he stammers out. “I just remembered the code, and I wondered if you’d changed it.”

“I’m about to take off,” Rey says, sounding as close to apologetic as he’s ever heard her. “I’ll to talk to you later?”

“Oh, right, sorry. Yeah, that is, yeah, of course,” he manages to mutter, feeling his cheeks burn with embarrassment. The line goes dead. 

He knows what’s happened as soon as he docks at Farpost Station. He can sense Rey clear across the outpost, waiting for him. In his civilian garb, he could be any of the wayward souls living on the far edges of the galaxy, a little dangerous, a little haunted, a little lost. He moves with purpose towards the hangar where she’s waiting, and it’s only when he’s standing at the base of the on-ramp, looking up into the dark mouth of her ship does he stop, the clarity of purpose that’s brought him this far abruptly vanishing. As if the turmoil building within him is a signal flare, Rey appears at the airlock. 

“How—?” he asks, gaping up at her.

“I used the Force.” A flicker of smile curls at the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t think that’s how the Force works,” he protests. But it doesn’t matter. She’s extending a hand, beckoning him forward. Kylo goes.

He lets Rey walk him through the ship he used to dreamed of. They are both pretending he’s a stranger here, to the ship and to its legacy. In a way, he nearly is. Much like the lightsaber she carries, it’s been made unrecognizable to him by time, by his choices and hers. 

Rey leads him down the corridor, pausing here and there to describe the many repairs and upgrades she’s carried out, voice piqued when she recounts the various and sundry indignities that the Falcon suffered before Rey found her. 

He doesn’t truly understand her purpose until they stand in the cockpit. The memories rise within him, more insistent than ever before. For the first time in years, Kylo doesn’t run from them. 

His father is in the pilot’s chair. _Buckle up, kid_. His legs dangle into open air, too short to touch the floor. Beneath his father’s hands, the Falcon swoops and dives, dancing her way through an asteroid field. Han whoops with joy after a particularly close shave.

Rey perches herself on the edge of the main console, watching him with her calm and knowing eyes. The grief rolls over him, years overdue. For the first time, he doesn’t it fight it. And when he’s certain he can no longer bear it, when the pain is sure to rend him limb from limb, Rey extends her arms. 

He presses himself into her space, comforted by the way her legs wrap around his waist and her forehead rests against his. His hands come down to rest on her hips, as natural as anything in the galaxy. There are a thousand things he needs to say to her, and all of them taste like glass on his tongue. 

“Rey, I—” 

“Don’t,” she says fiercely. “Whatever you’re about to say, I don’t want to hear it. Not yet, not now.” She thumps her fists against the broad expanse of his chest with each word. Her eyes are bright and fearsome.

“You’re angry,” Kylo says, testing the waters. He is intimately familiar with his own temper, with the anger of his master and his fellow Knights. It is a volcanic rage that drives them, a towering inferno that threatens to consume each of them from the inside even as it drives them on. Rey’s anger is of an entirely different character. It’s tempered with sadness, forged into the steel that he knows lies beneath her soft skin.

Rey sighs, her hands reaching up curl around the back of his neck, short nails scraping against the base of his skull. It sends a shiver down his spine, and warmth through his limbs, the first he’s felt since Snoke’s summons had left his heart encased in ice. 

“It won’t be true,” she tells him. “Not yet. And you’re a terrible liar.”

So he kisses her, the only truth he’s certain of. The first press of their lips is fire, igniting his bones, quickening his breath and hers. Rey’s hand are suddenly _everywhere_ , grasping at his wrists, tugging at his hair, slipping beneath his tunic. Kylo has always thought of her as fire, but now, as her hips begin to rock insistently against him, he thinks of the ocean, glimmering in sunlight. He imagines sinking into the dark depths, sinking into _Rey_ , drowning in her.

“Off,” Rey demands, pulling back from her determined attack on his mouth to tug insistently at the hem of his shirt. He obeys, shivering a little as the cool air of the ship meets his overheated skin. His reward is the trail of open-mouthed kisses that Rey leaves across his chest, her hands sinking down to cup his ass and pull him even closer.

Sensations are beginning to slip between them, so that Kylo feels the friction of Rey’s top against her suddenly too-sensitive breasts, the rush of heat between her thighs. He slips his hand between them to chase that warmth, stroking her through the fabric of her leggings. A series of soft _ohs_ escape her lips, puffs of breath against his neck. 

Emboldened, he fumbles at her waistband, until at last he can brush against her, press into her. Rey is hot and slick against his fingers, bearing down against his hand, showing him the rhythm she desires with the roll of her hips and the arch of her back. Pleasure arcs between them, a running current, leaving him near dizzy with desire. 

Acting on instinct, following the thread of her thoughts and the half-voiced desires echoing in her mind, Kylo drops to his knees. Rey voices her displeasure when his fingers cease their motion, but he feels the way her breath catches when he begins to peel the cloth of her leggings back. He’s so focused on the smooth expanse of her thighs that he hardly notices her own movements, until he looks up to find that she’s divested herself of her shirt. 

He slows, trying to chart every scar, every freckle, trying to burn into his mind a sight he’d never even dared to dream. He tugs at her legs until they rest upon his shoulders, the heels of her feet digging at his shoulder blades. He kisses the knobs of her knees, licks a long stripe up the softness of her thigh. It doesn’t matter that he’s never done this before, doesn’t matter that all he knows of intimacy is kneeling before this slip of a girl. 

Rey is in his head, Rey is in his heart. He chases her pleasure, with his fingers, with his tongue. In return, she carves new routes through hyperspace on his skin. He drowns in her, he loses the thread of his thoughts, follows hers instead. 

There’s a moment when her breath quickens, when Rey _moans_ above him, clutching at his arms, his shoulders. Her whole body trembles, and Kylo curls his fingers deep within her, licks hard against her clit. Rey falls apart above him, her entire body flaring up with light, pulling him along for the ride.

_It feels like flying_ , she had said. _Oh_ , Kylo thinks. _Oh_. 

 

**9\. there is no death, there is the Force**

Kylo rests his head against her thigh, still kneeling on the cockpit floor. She’s barely even thought of stumbling back to her bunk before he rises, pulling her into his arms with a single swift motion. She tastes herself on his lips and it sends another wave of heat through her limbs and through his. 

The walk to her room seems to take an eternity. Kylo lays her out on her bed, curling his body around hers. The bed is not, precisely, large enough for the two of them, though it remains the most comfortable thing Rey has ever slept on in her life. But Finn had clearly been thinking of a single, skinny girl when he’d redone the cabin, not the six foot plus man who is currently sprawling there. 

_Sorry Finn_ , she thinks, feeling a touch hysterical. After all, she’s lying naked here with Kylo Ren, his hands charting paths across her ribs, and somehow it is most the natural thing she’s ever known. Rey can feel his hardness pressed against her stomach, just the flimsy fabric of his pants between them. His desire is intermixed with hers, to the point where she’s no longer certain where her arousal begins and his ends.

“I haven’t… I’ve never done this before,” he tells her, when her hands begin to explore beneath the waistband of his pants, brushing tantalizingly close to his cock. Clearly, he’s taken her request for honesty to heart.

“Me either,” she tells him, truth for truth. “We’ll figure it out. We can use the F—” Kylo makes a noise that in a smaller, generally less menacing person might be called a squawk.

“That is _definitely_ not how the Force works,” he tells her, indignant. But he’s smiling, maybe the first time she’s ever seen him do that. So she takes his cock in hand, and Kylo’s eyes flutter shut, his whole body going taut beneath her. Rey slides his pants down his thighs, grins when he moves quickly to remove the last barrier to the press of her flesh on his.

He doesn’t need words to ask for what he wants, what he aches for, because Rey’s pretty sure she hasn’t actually left his mind since the first moment he began to stroke her with his delicate fingers. She obliges, straddling his hips, reaching down to stroke the length of him once again. Kylo thrusts into her grip, hands coming up to squeeze at her thighs. 

She rises up above him, takes his cock within her in a single motion. They both stop, staring wide eyed at one another in the semi-darkness. Sensation floods between them, the slick wetness of her body clenched around his dick, the brief burn she feels as her muscles stretch around him for the first time. The sharp angles of his pelvis dig into the softness of her thighs, and when Rey begins her first shaky motions, his hands dig into the bones of her hips. She’ll have bruises tomorrow, scars of a different kind.

Kylo reaches up with uncertain hands, cupping her breasts, brushing against her nipples. Electricity is trickling down her spine, and surely he feels it too, because his breathing is growing ragged, the jerk of his hips becoming frantic. Rey shifts, the angle changing, and suddenly stars begin to bloom behind her eyes. She undulates above him, back arching, toes curling. 

“Please, please, Rey, _please_ ,” he begs, even as his fingers skate down between them to rub at her clit. The warmth that fills her threatens to spill over, and then at last Rey is filled with light, buoyed with it, the purest form of meditation. Her eyes fall shut and the universe explodes around her, expanding with infinite speed. Behind her eyelids galaxies form, stars are born. Light drives out the darkness. Kylo is there with her, at the center of creation, and she feels the moment that he falls, spilling into her with short, sharp thrusts.

Later, they lie together, limbs tangled, sweat still cooling on their skin. Lying in the darkness, Rey tells him stories of the Graveyard of Ships, the cavernous hulking carcasses of Imperial Destroyers, being eaten away by winds and sand and small, clever hands. She drifts into sleep in the circle of his arms, lulled by the steady beat of his heart against her ear. 

Rey wakes to find him gone, and his absence is an ache within her chest. His departure echoes in her mind, a jolting pain that woke him, further summons from his master. The shuddering breaths he’d taken, trying to calm a mind thrown into tumultuous panic. 

_I’ll come back_ , he’d whispered as she slept. She knows it isn’t true. 

Rey has spent the better (worst) part of her life waiting. All that had ended when she’d picked up the lightsaber, when she’d let the Millennium Falcon become her home, when she’d let Finn and Han and Luke and Chewie become her family. Rey is done with waiting, done with promises left unfulfilled. 

Kylo’s route is burned into her mind, and Rey is done with waiting. She charts the course, fires up the engines. 

Several hours into the flight, a burst of pain nearly blinds her and Kylo vanishes from her mind. The connection between them, a low and gentle pulse at the back of her head, is abruptly severed. No amount of concentration can bring him back into her focus. Rey scans her maps with something akin to desperation, searching for any curl or eddy in spacetime that will bring her to her destination more quickly. Even the Force is difficult to grab onto, out here in the deepest reaches of the Unknown Regions. Rey has never felt so alone, not since she left Jakku.

The planet, when she drops out of hyperspace into its orbit, seems utterly without life. And yet, she can feel the darkness, roiling, waiting with what feels like hunger. Rey shivers, reaches out again, searching for any hint of Kylo down on the surface. The Falcon’s sensors ping, having found his shuttle, but nowhere can she sense a trace of him.

Rey lands in the center of a dead and broken city, spires of black rock rising silent around her. His shuttle is empty, abandoned. Before her rises a single monolithic structure, a temple to some ancient evil. A series of open doors, more a yawning mouth than a piece of architecture, beckon to her. 

The corridor she travels down is nearly pitch black, except for a series of small lights that blink on as she approaches, vanishing as she passes by. And at the end, what could be minutes or hours later, Rey steps into a cavernous chamber. Its distant roof is held up by ancient, weathered pillars, near invisible in the gloom. 

Rey steps forward, lightsaber in hand. A pressure builds against her ribs, turning each breath into a struggle, worsening as she moves deeper into the room. Slowly, tiny lights flicker on beneath her feet, filling the hall with an eery, insubstantial glow, illuminating a silvery pyramid that rises up from the smooth black floor at the very heart of the chamber. 

The Knights of Ren stand before her, hooded figures ringing the silver edifice. Rey reaches out with the Force, scanning their masked faces. She feels _nothing_. It’s not the emptiness of space, because even in the emptiest corners of the galaxy, the Force flows freely. It’s as if the Knights hold in their hearts black holes that try to swallow her Light when she looks at them. Shuddering, she takes an instinctive step back, only to stumble against someone behind her, standing motionless. She turns, panicked.

Kylo Ren stands before her. Rey neither heard his approach or sensed his presence, and sickly fear tightens her throat. He is unmasked, but it hardly matters. His visage is hewn in stone, a hard blank stare that sends chills down her spine. She has never seen him like before. Even on Starkiller, he was overfull with emotion, conflict raging within him. 

He pulls Rey flush against his body, one hand resting at the small of her back, one hand cupping her chin, icily cold. She fights to escape but his grip is unyielding. 

_Rey_ , he says, his voice ringing in her mind, echoing through the chamber. She tries to clap her hands against her ears, to drown out the metallic screeching sound that accompanies his words. Kylo speaks to her, mouth moving, but he makes no sound and the voice in her head is alien and wrong. 

_You have come to me at last, child. All these years, I have been waiting for you._ The sound is excruciating, but Rey cannot block it out, cannot close her mind against it. The voice continues, merciless, speaking without emotion or tone. And all the while, Kylo holds her in a terrible parody of a lover’s embrace.

_Long did I search, after Skywalker hid you away. I felt your Awakening clear across the galaxy. You have no idea, Rey, how brightly you burn. And now you have come to me. Can you feel it nearing, the end of your journey? All your questions, I can answer them._

The light changes, and the room seems to shrink. They stand in the fallen AT-AT that was Rey’s home for too many years. Kylo’s grip loosens. She pulls free and stares with horror at the life she left behind. The small desert flower, the pilot’s helmet, the thousands upon thousands of scratches on the walls.

_You wonder why you were left here, just a child, stranded on a hostile world, forgotten in the backwaters of the galaxy. You wonder why they never came for you. Even now, it eats at you, a hollow gnawing thing that grows within your heart, no matter how you seek to overcome it._

Kylo reaches out to brush her chest, and for a moment Rey fears that he will reach through her ribs to pluck out her heart.

_But in truth, you know the same as I, Rey. You have never belonged. Not to Jakku, not to the Resistance, not to the Jedi. But I_ see _you, Rey. I see the Force within you, I know where it seeks to lead you, where you were always meant to go. I could build a universe just for you. Let me show you, Rey._

_All you have to do is let me in._

Rey screams. The vision shatters, leaving them in the chamber once again. Rey’s knees are shaking. She wants to sink down to the ground, to clutch at Kylo’s chest. She gathers herself, and turns back towards the pyramid.

“What have you done to Kylo, Snoke?” she demands, trying to conjure fire with her voice, even though her body feels coated with ice. “Give him back!” 

A alien laugh echoes through the hall.

_Anything for you, dear Rey._ Light flares, blinding her momentarily. When the spots clear from her eyes, Rey stands at the summit of the island on the ocean world. The sun is sinking into the sea, lighting the sky on fire. The smells of salt and damp soil fill her nose, and overhead the gulls cry out in greeting. 

And then there is Kylo, armor gone, eyes warm, reaching out to wrap her in his arms. He bends down, burying his head in the curve of her shoulder. She can feel the beat of his heart, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. His lips travel the length of the scar he gave her, breath warm on her skin. His voice, his _real_ voice, whispers in her ear.

“We could build a home here, Rey,” he murmurs. “Can’t you see it? No First Order, no Resistance. Just you and me.”

“This isn’t real, Kylo. It’s a trick, it has to be.” Her voice wavers, uncertain. Kylo’s lips trace a path across her cheek, he presses soft kisses against the corner of her mouth. His hands roam lower, brushing down the bumps of her spine, fingers dipping beneath the waist of her leggings. Rey’s entire body sighs beneath his touch.

“I’d do anything for you, Rey. Wouldn’t you do the same for me?” He’s pressed tight against her, and she can feel him growing hard against her stomach. Rey fights the urge to close her eyes and rock back against him. 

“We’ll be together forever, don’t you see? I will _never_ leave you,” he promises. “All you have to do is open your mind and let me in. You would do that for me, wouldn’t you?”

“I…” she feels the touch of his mind against hers, as familiar to her as the hilt of her lightsaber or the cockpit of the Falcon. Her own mind is clouding over, overwhelmed by the furnace of his body and the mixture of longing and lust mingled in his dark eyes as he meets her gaze. Slowly, hesitantly, she reaches for the flickering tendrils of his thoughts and opens up her mind.

Darkness slams down upon her, and with a scream, Rey falls into nothingness. Icy fingers claw through her mind as a choking pressure cuts off her air.

_NO._ A blazing star bursts into existence, nearly blinding her. Distantly, Rey hears an inhuman scream. With a gasp, she finds herself back in the hall, fallen down onto all fours, gasping for air. Luke stands before her, blazing in a halo of light.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to find you,” he says, reaching down to help Rey to stand on shaky legs. 

“How did you—where did you—,” Rey’s questions get tangled up on her tongue, her mouth still dry, as if she’s still standing in the deserts of Jakku. 

Sounds of movement make them both look up. The Knights of Ren are advancing, seven figures moving as one, lightsabers drawn. Kylo Ren leads them. Gone is the man Rey thought she knew. A monster wears his face like a mask, staring her down with cold, dead eyes.

Luke’s saber flares to life, and Rey follows suit, trying to ground herself in the familiar sensations of the hilt beneath her hand. Instinctively, she tries to match Luke’s breathing, to wrap herself in the Force that emanates from him. 

“Luke,” she says, voice trembling, “I can’t find it. I can’t feel the Force. It isn’t here, there’s only darkness.” 

Luke reaches out, grasping her icy hand in his much warmer one. 

“The Force is calling to you, Rey, even here, in the darkness. All you have to do is let it in.” For a moment, all she can hear is Snoke-as-Kylo, entreating her with honeyed, poisoned words. Nausea rises in her throat. But Luke squeezes her hand, and Rey remembers the first time she’d ever held another’s hand, when Finn had run headlong into her life. She remembers Chewie’s hugs, and Poe’s exuberant grin. Leia’s strength, Luke’s quiet pride, and Han, giving her a blaster, teaching her to shoot. She remembers Kylo, the _real_ Kylo, who had kissed her with tears on his cheeks, who made her feel afraid, who made her feel like she was flying. 

Rey closes her eyes and sinks into the Light. The darkness makes a last futile push against her, but Rey pushes back, the Force roaring through her at last. An alien howl echoes through the chamber.

The Knights of Ren close in around them, pushing Luke and Rey together until they stand back-to-back, weapons held at the ready.

_If you will not join me,_ the voice says from above, brimming with rage, _then you will_ die _._

The Knights attack. In their black robes and masks, they are nearly indistinguishable from one another as they converge on the Jedi. All except for Kylo, still unmasked, whose pale, scarred face is pulled into a awful snarl as he charges forward. Rey ducks and weaves, parrying blows when she can, dodging when she cannot. Through it all, the Force is her guide. 

She doesn’t see Luke take down two of the Knights, but she feels it, twin blots of rage that flare and vanish from the universe. She sees now for the first time insubstantial threads, shimmering blackly in her vision, that connect each Knight back to the altar. The thickest of them wraps around Kylo’s throat, seeming to pulse with a malevolent heartbeat. 

“Luke,” she cries out, “he’s controlling them all, like puppets.”

“He drains their life to sustain his own,” he replies. 

Rey thinks of the scavengers back on Jakku, who fought and stole among themselves, desperate to survive, and of the junk traders like Unkar Plutt, who grew fat and old off the desperation of the poor. As a child, Rey had railed against the injustice of her world, but only ever in the privacy of her own head. She had been powerless to fight. 

Snoke is just another Plutt, but now Rey is far from powerless. She renews her attacks, slicing through the sinew of one Knight’s arm, cutting another down at the knees. The Knights fall, one by one, until only Kylo remains.

He and Luke are locked together, blades sparking madly at the furthest end of the hall. Rey can see the way the older man’s arm shakes with exertion, how Kylo is slowly bearing down on him. 

“Kylo, you have to stop this now,” she shouts, sprinting towards them. She isn’t fast enough, she realizes with horror, as Kylo’s blank eyes glance towards her. He grins, savage and cruel.

“Don’t you understand, child? Kylo Ren is dead. This body is mine now,” Snoke says with Kylo’s mouth. He raises his arms high, lightsaber crackling madly, and Rey _wills_ Luke to parry the strike. Luke straightens, smiling back at Rey. He deactivates his saber and before Rey can understand what is happening, Snoke cuts him down in a single, vicious blow. 

For a single, horrible moment, Luke still stands. And then his body seems to crumple inwards. A great gust of wind roars through the hall, and Luke’s robes fall empty to the ground. The tinny roll of his lightsaber hilt across the stone floor is the only noise. And then a keening cry echoes across space. It’s her, she’s the one making that noise, she realizes distantly. 

Rey moves, faster than light, blades whirling. Snoke parries her stroke, eyes dancing madly, and his power vast, pressing down against her. She swings again, muscles straining. This isn’t Kylo she faces, it’s something much older, full of ancient hate. Fear bites into Rey, a new and unfamiliar terror, as Snoke forces her down to her knees with the press of his mind.

And yet, there is a light growing in the space between them.Something is building in the air, something sparking and strange.

_An awakening_ , she thinks, without knowing what that means. Snoke must feel it too, because his movements slow, becoming jerky and distorted. Rey’s parries with a fierce desperation, catches his cross guard, and now it’s her turn to bear down, struggling to her feet, leveraging the length of her staff to force him to the ground. 

Something shifts.

“Rey,” he says, not Snoke-as-Kylo, but _Kylo_. “Rey, you have to kill me. It’s the only way to destroy him.” He looks at her, wild eyed. 

“Rey, _please_.” Already she can see Snoke regaining control, lashing out with a wild swing of his sword.

A voice rings in her mind. Luke.

_Trust the Force, Rey. You know what to do_. She does. 

She strikes out, severing Kylo’s hand and destroying his weapon in a single blow, and in the same motion, throws her entire being into his mind.

 

**10\. through victory, my chains are broken**

Ben is trapped in the darkness. He’s been trapped there for an eternity, maybe, first a prison of his own design, and now something far, far worse. He had lost the fight with Kylo Ren the moment that the other had resolved to kill his father, lost so brutally that he’d been prepared to die, to fade away in some deep, distant corner of Kylo’s being. 

And then Rey had torn her way into Kylo’s mind. She tugged at him, the Light in her blinding him, calling him. The more Kylo looked, the brighter she became, the fiercer her gravitational pull, until one day for a moment he didn’t know who was Kylo and who was Ben, because they both loved her so. 

Snoke slithers into his body as though as his carefully built walls are so much smoke. It no longer matters if he’s Ben or Kylo, because Snoke bears down, a creature built of millennia of darkness, and tries to strike him from existence. But if there’s one thing Ben has learned, in a decade of being a prisoner within his own mind, it’s how to hide. And so he does, sinking down into the island, his last and only link to Rey. 

Ben wakes slowly, from a sleep like death. Images flash before his eyes, and in slow motion, he watches Snoke kill Luke with his own hand. He watches Rey scream, and knows with dawning certainty that this is a fight she cannot win. A wind whips through the hall, and it sounds like it’s whispering his name. _Ben_.

Grief builds within him, a wild, reckless thing that threatens to overwhelm him. Ben is a creature of pain and smoke, helpless and insubstantial within his own mind. He throws himself against the bars of his cage, desperate, hopeless.

_You have the strength within you, Ben. You always have_. Luke shimmers into view before him in the darkness. He reaches out a ghostly hand, brushes the hair out from Ben’s eyes. His touch is a cleansing fire.

Ben awakens.

He looks at Rey for the first time, through his own eyes. She is fierce and wild and alive before him, blindingly bright in his vision. He knows what he has to do. Ben is strong, but Snoke is strong too. His rush of Light is wavering against the onslaught of darkness that is Snoke within his mind. Ben falters, fighting against the arm swings his lightsaber wildly towards Rey. 

Rey strikes with her staff, and Ben knows a whole new kind of fire. She strikes with her mind, and Ben falls apart. 

_OUT_. Her voice thunders in his mind. _Get OUT_. 

The darkness quails before her, shrinking back, but Ben can see its tendrils snaking back, searching for any opening, any opportunity. 

“Ben?” she’s standing next to him, holding out her hand. “It’s your mind.” 

He takes her hand in his. The darkness screams, lashing out with a thousand grasping arms that seek to drag them both under. Rey blazes, bright as a supernova, and awestruck, Ben sees that she’s drawing light from deep within him, from a wellspring he never knew existed. 

_OUT_ , he says, his voice bending with hers, burning brighter still, and for the first time in some fifteen years, Ben knows himself to be truly free.

He opens his eyes. Rey has fallen to the ground beside him, and for a moment, he fears the worst. But no, he sees the pulse jumping at her neck. He struggles to his feet, off-balance, and very carefully avoids looking at the cauterized stump of his right arm. 

Wispy shadows gather above them, rising from the fallen knights, from Ben himself. They funnel towards the pyramid, which hums menacingly in the semi-darkness. Ben scrambles, clumsy with his left hand (his only hand), until he finds Luke’s lightsaber. The steady green glow of the blade comforts him, and he surges forward, lashing out at the silver structure. He’s as wild with his blows as he ever was against the consoles and walls of Imperial ships.

The thing falls open, and Ben stumbles back in horror. There is creature within the pyramid, a desiccated, misshapen thing, more wire and metal than anything, only a wheezing rattle to show that it’s alive. It’s Snoke, he realizes, seeing the face that had flickered, stories tall, in the holochamber of Starkiller. There is no hesitation on his part. He beheads the creature, severs the wires that connect it to the interior of the pyramid, doesn’t stop until every light has died within the small chamber. 

The whole hall begins to shudder ominously. Ben runs to Rey, kneels at her side.

“We have to go, Rey. I think this place is collapsing.” Rey is just as shaky on her feet, sinking down against his chest. He loops her arms around his neck and pulls her up as best he can with a single arm. Chunks of masonry are beginning to rain down upon them, and so Ben runs.

The Millennium Falcon is waiting in the courtyard just beyond the hall. Ben has never been so glad to see his father’s ship.

“Rey, you gotta come quick! Poe says that whole planet is collapsing!” FN-2187… Finn is standing on the Falcon’s on-ramp, waving his hands. He freezes, almost comically, when he sees Ben. Rey struggles up in his arms.

“Finn? How’d you get here?” The boy’s mouth opens and closes several times in quick succession. Ben is now quite certain he’d find it funny, if he weren’t in excruciating pain. Finn must decide that taking care of Rey is more important than dealing with Ben, because he comes to her side, grabbing one of Rey’s hands and leading them both into the interior of the ship. Ben approves of him for that. Rey is more important than _everything_.

“Poe and I followed, as soon as we realized you’d gone off without us. He had to take off, once the planet started falling apart,” he tells her, glancing at Ben from the corner of his eye.

“You shouldn’t’ve,” Rey mumbles, near slurring with exhaustion. “S’dangerous.” Finn is clearly once again torn in two when they reach Rey’s bunk, watching as Ben lays the girl out on her bed. It was barely two days ago that they’d lain here together, Ben thinks. It might as well have been a lifetime. One of her hands is still curled into the fabric of his shirt. He pries her fingers open as gently as he can, struggling with his left hand.

Finn makes another split-second decision.

“You’re gonna have to help me pilot,” he says to Ben.

“Ben! Your arm,” Rey says, struggling to sit up again. “We have to, the medkit.”

“Later, Rey. When the planet isn’t falling apart beneath our feet.” He leans over, pressing her back down onto the pillows. And then, because he is alive and she is alive and Snoke is dead, he brushes a kiss across her forehead.

Finn’s stare doesn’t hold a candle to Rey’s, but he still manages to peer right into the depths of Ben’s soul. Ben stares back, even-keeled. 

“Alright… Ben,” he says at last. “Time to fly.”

 

**11\. the Force shall free me**

Rey wakes up in a bed that isn’t her own, panicking on instinct. Finn’s face floats into view, and she calms, just as instinctual. His smile is luminescent and infectious. 

“You’re awake! You slept for _four days_ , I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” Rey struggles to sit up, taking in the room. If it’s the medical wing of a resistance base, it’s not one she’s seen before. For one thing, she’s got her own private room, it seems. Sunlight filters in through a window, and Rey thinks she sees trees beyond.

“I hope you didn’t spend all of those four days here, Finn. I’m fine, truly.” She frowns in distaste. Her mouth _feels_ like she’s been asleep for at least that long. Finn hands her a glass of water just as she turns to look for one.

“It’s the most amazing thing, Rey. The First Order is falling apart out there, ever since… whatever it was you did out there in the Unknown Regions. And the New Republic is finally stepping up, actually helping us fight. I guess they’ve decided it’s safe enough for them, with the Order on its last legs.”

“That’s good. That’s really good,” she says. Her whole body aches, not the strain of overexertion, but something that goes bone deep, a hurt on her spirit. Her gaze skates over to the bedside table, where not one but two lightsabers lie. Rey closes her eyes against the memories that flood her mind. Snoke’s furious onslaught, and _Luke_. She hears Finn make a worried noise at her side. 

“Where is he?” She doesn’t need to clarify. Finn’s mouth twists unhappily.

“He’s… in the brig. He hasn’t said anything, not since we landed. Not even to General Organa.”

“I need to see him,” Rey says, throwing her covers off and trying to stand. Finn reaches out to catch her, when her first attempt sees her sinking back onto the bed.

“I told you, four days. You need to take it easy.”

“You don’t understand, Finn, he killed Snoke. I couldn’t have, not alone, and he… and _Luke_ …” Rey squeezes her eyes shut, lets the grief wash over her. She breathes slow, lets the feeling settle into her, before she opens her eyes again.

“I need to see him,” she repeats. Finn takes in the determined set of her jaw and sighs.He reaches out to loop one of her arms around his shoulders and help her to her feet.

Rey can feel him long before the brig comes into sight. She can feel him, but his mind is closed to her, and it makes her edgy, nearly anxious. She doesn’t know what it means. The guards at the door eye the pair of them uncomfortably, and Rey is half ready to convince them with the Force if necessary. But Finn just leans in, a genial smile on his face.

“The General ok’d this visit herself,” he says, and after a moment, the guards step aside.

“Aye sir,” one murmurs.

“Guess you really are a big deal after all,” Rey says, teasingly.

“Hush you,” he grumbles. They reach the end of the hall, and Finn stops. He makes a shooing motion. “Go on, go talk to him.”

Through the bars she can see him, sitting perfectly still against the far wall. He’s dressed in white, and his right arm is wrapped in clean bandages. His eyes are closed, as though he’s simply sleeping.

Rey closes her eyes, and opens them on the island, in the last moments before dawn. She climbs the water-worn stairs, as she’s done a thousand times before. There’s a dull ache in her chest, at odds with the lightness of being that buoys her and moves her forward. Eleven hundred and sixty four steps, and when she’s climbed them all, he’s waiting there at the summit.

Ben is standing at the rocky precipice, staring down at the ocean below. He turns when she approaches, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. Rey leans into his hand.

“You came back,” she says, something akin to wonder creeping into her voice.

“You saved me,” he replies, voice rough and warm. His thumb traces circles across her cheek.

“You saved yourself,” she counters, recalling the words Luke had spoken on this very spot, maybe millennia ago.

“And you came back for me.” All the anger and fear he used to carry are gone, leaving only guilt and sadness that stretch out within him, an endless sea of quiet pain. And yet, floating above it all, is hope.

Rey steps into the circle of his arms, rests her head against his chest. She listens to the beat of Ben’s heart. The sun begins to rise and it sets the ocean on fire, until the whole world is light.


End file.
